If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

It's interesting that when gay rights groups invoke Loving v Virginia (interracial marriage) they are told that the one has nothing to do with the other. But when some fringe group is attributed to have used gay rights as a supportive principle then the relationship is unquestioned.

The issue of legal incest and how it is defined has been in play for 2000 years. Egyptians married siblings and Romans didn't. By the 14th century the Pope (back when anyone cared) decreed that incest was marriage within the sixth degree. IN some states first cousin marriage is legal but double first cousin marriage is illegal. IN Utah first cousins can marry, but only if the female is past child bearing years.

I wonder how the offspring of serial single mothers know they aren't marrying a sibling. I have to wonder if it matters given the random rutting of those who went west in the 19th century.

The issue of legal slavery and how it is defined has been in play since recorded history started. What does the legality of something that have to do wit its moral acceptability?

The issue at hand here is not so much the acceptability of incest and bestiality but the fact that they are mile markers on the slippery slope that was predicted at the begining of the debate on same sex marriage. The fact that these groups (and others) are now making their case for inclusion in the accepted behavior club confirms that validity of the slippery slope argument. They are clinging to the coat tails of the same sex marriage movement by using the same arguments.

“Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.”
G. K. Chesterton

I've always understood the incest exception in abortion to be designed around father on daughter incest which is presumably rape as well. As for first cousin marriages, you're stepping on quite a few toes of the mainstream descendants of American colonial culture as well as ethnic-Europeans.

Yes, and you and I both know the reputations of those descenda

Originally Posted by Novaheart

JUstice rarely emerges from consensus in a mob. It was not a popular vote which ended legal discrimination against blacks and jews, it was coercive government.

Justice rarely emerges from coercive government, which instituted the rules in the first place. And, once again, this isn't about discrimination. Gays are legally entitled to marry someone of the opposite sex, which is the definition of marriage. There is no legal hurdle against that. What gays are demanding is that we redefine marriage to suit their immediate gratification. This is the exact opposite of what blacks and Jews asked for in anti-discrimination law, namely that the rules be the same for everyone. Jackie Robinson didn't demand that the major leagues redefine the rules of the game to benefit him, he just asked that the rules be applied to him equally. Jesse Owens didn't demand a different clock at the 1936 Olympics, he just wanted to be allowed to run on the same track. Gays are not demanding the right to marry, they are demanding that marriage be changed to suit them.

Originally Posted by Novaheart

I have never seen anything which supports what you are saying here. Everything I have read says that a rudimentary understanding of genetics by late 19th Century scientists was crafted to a support a changing attitude towards cousin marriage.

√In Paris in 1876 a 31-year-old banker named Albert took an 18-year-old named Bettina as his wife. Both were Rothschilds, and they were cousins. According to conventional notions about inbreeding, their marriage ought to have been a prescription for infertility and enfeeblement.
In fact, Albert and Bettina went on to produce seven children, and six of them lived to be adults. Moreover, for generations the Rothschildfamily had been inbreeding almost as intensively as European royalty, without apparent ill effect. Despite his own limited gene pool, Albert, for instance, was an outdoorsman and the seventh person ever to climb the Matterhorn. The American du Ponts practiced the same strategy of cousin marriage for a century. Charles Darwin, the grandchild of first cousins, married a first cousin. So did Albert Einstein.
In our lore, cousin marriages are unnatural, the province of hillbillies and swamp rats, not Rothschilds and Darwins. In the United States they are deemed such a threat to mental health that 31 states have outlawed first-cousin marriages. This phobia is distinctly American, a heritage of early evolutionists with misguided notions about the upward march of human societies. Their fear was that cousin marriages would cause us to breed our way back to frontier savagery—or worse. "You can't marry your first cousin," a character declares in the 1982 play Brighton Beach Memoirs. "You get babies with nine heads."
So when a team of scientists led by Robin L. Bennett, a genetic counselor at the University of Washington and the president of the National Society of Genetic Counselors, announced that cousin marriages are not significantly riskier than any other marriage, it made the front page of The New York Times. The study, published in the Journal of Genetic Counseling last year, determined that children of first cousins face about a 2 to 3 percent higher risk of birth defects than the population at large. To put it another way, first-cousin marriages entail roughly the same increased risk of abnormality that a woman undertakes when she gives birth at 41 rather than at 30. Banning cousin marriages makes about as much sense, critics argue, as trying to ban childbearing by older women.
But the nature of cousin marriage is far more surprising than recent publicity has suggested. A closer look reveals that moderate inbreeding has always been the rule, not the exception, for humans. Inbreeding is also commonplace in the natural world, and contrary to our expectations, some biologists argue that this can be a very good thing. It depends in part on the degree of inbreeding.

http://www.consang.net/images/d/dd/01AHBWeb3.pdfConsanguinity, morbidity, and mortality
The detrimental health effects associated with consanguinity are caused by the expression of rare, recessive genes inherited from a common ancestor(s). In populations where inbred unions are common, increased levels of morbidity and mortality caused by the action of detrimental recessive genes can be predicted. Generally, inbreeding is associated with loss of biological fitness. It is however appropriate to note that, even in the absence of preferential consanguinity, alleles which are rare in large populations can rapidly increase to high frequency in a breeding pool of restricted size, because of factors such as founder effect and random genetic drift.

Empirical studies on the progeny of first cousins indicate morbidity levels to be some 1% to 4% higher than in the offspring of unrelated couples (reviewed in Bittles and Makov 1988). The less common a disorder, the greater the influence of consanguinity on its prevalence, a generalization that applies to recessive multigene disorders as well as to single gene conditions. For this reason, many previously unrecognized genetic diseases have first been diagnosed in highly endogamous communities, and in a significant proportion of cases the underlying mutation may be unique to the community. At a practical level, this community-specific pattern of disease leads to major problems when attempting to estimate
the burden imposed by consanguinity-associated morbidity at national or even at regional and local levels.

In a study based on combined data from 38 populations in eastern and southern Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and South America, with average coefficient of inbreeding (α) values ranging from 0.0005 to 0.0370, mean excess mortality at the first cousin level was 4.4% (Bittles and Neel 1994). This estimate appears to be valid for all of the large human populations so far examined. However, consanguinity interacts with a range of sociodemographic variables in determining rates of mortality during infancy and early childhood. When these influences were simultaneously analyzed using data collected retrospectively as part of the 1990/91 Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey, the major determinants of early death were maternal illiteracy, maternal age at birth of less than 20 years, and a birth interval of less than 18 months. But, even after controlling for these factors, first cousin progeny had statistically significant odds ratios for neonatal, postneonatal, and infant mortality of 1.36, 1.28, and 1.32, respectively (Grant and Bittles 1997).

And, while the Rothchilds may have escaped the consequences of inbreeding (according to that one article), other European dynasts were not so lucky:

The Role of Inbreeding in the Extinction of a European Royal Dynastyhttp://www.plosone.org/article/info:...l.pone.0005174
Abstract
The kings of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty (1516–1700) frequently married close relatives in such a way that uncle-niece, first cousins and other consanguineous unions were prevalent in that dynasty. In the historical literature, it has been suggested that inbreeding was a major cause responsible for the extinction of the dynasty when the king Charles II, physically and mentally disabled, died in 1700 and no children were born from his two marriages, but this hypothesis has not been examined from a genetic perspective. In this article, this hypothesis is checked by computing the inbreeding coefficient (F) of the Spanish Habsburg kings from an extended pedigree up to 16 generations in depth and involving more than 3,000 individuals. The inbreeding coefficient of the Spanish Habsburg kings increased strongly along generations from 0.025 for king Philip I, the founder of the dynasty, to 0.254 for Charles II and several members of the dynasty had inbreeding coefficients higher than 0.20. In addition to inbreeding due to unions between close relatives, ancestral inbreeding from multiple remote ancestors makes a substantial contribution to the inbreeding coefficient of most kings. A statistically significant inbreeding depression for survival to 10 years is detected in the progenies of the Spanish Habsburg kings. The results indicate that inbreeding at the level of first cousin (F = 0.0625) exerted an adverse effect on survival of 17.8%±12.3. It is speculated that the simultaneous occurrence in Charles II (F = 0.254) of two different genetic disorders: combined pituitary hormone deficiency and distal renal tubular acidosis, determined by recessive alleles at two unlinked loci, could explain most of the complex clinical profile of this king, including his impotence/infertility which in last instance led to the extinction of the dynasty.

In other words, there are numerous medical reasons for the incest taboos and laws.

Originally Posted by FlaGator

The issue of legal slavery and how it is defined has been in play since recorded history started. What does the legality of something that have to do wit its moral acceptability?

Nova's argument is that the morality of incest, and therefore its legality, should be based on objective criteria, but when presented with evidence of that criteria, such as higher risks of genetic abnormalities, birth defects and other negative consequences, he attempts to downplay the facts and turn it back into an issue of civil rights.

Originally Posted by FlaGator

The issue at hand here is not so much the acceptability of incest and bestiality but the fact that they are mile markers on the slippery slope that was predicted at the begining of the debate on same sex marriage. The fact that these groups (and others) are now making their case for inclusion in the accepted behavior club confirms that validity of the slippery slope argument. They are clinging to the coat tails of the same sex marriage movement by using the same arguments.

Exactly. And that is why Nova has to take two tacks with this, the first being that gay marriage, incest, polygamy and other abnormal (meant in the clinical sense, as in, outside of the norm) relations have nothing to do with each other, and the second being that even though they have nothing to do with each other, they don't hurt anyone, so why should we deny the same recognition that we give to marriage to these relationships? The fact that this is the same argument used to justify gay marriage doesn't register, or if it does, it must be denied, because it undermines the longterm goal of the eradication of stable familial ties which would act as a counter to the institutions that progressives seek to impose upon us. Families have specific functions, usually what we consider traditional roles of father and mother. Progressives, who seek to change our very natures, loathe the traditional sexual roles and functions, and seek to undermine them at every turn. Thus is just more of the same.